Description

Joanna Mason, a Senior Program Manager for Expression Blend, is working on several sessions for MIX09 for illustrating best practices of how to keep the designer involved throughout the entire development process of applications. Joanna worked for many
years in the design community prior to coming to Microsoft, specifically to work on the Expression Blend team and be able to take an active role in creating a great tool for designers, such as herself to use.

The Discussion

Still wondering when SP2 will be out for Blend. Design view still has some bugs in it that requires restarting it once a day or so.

And if Blend is going to get features we'll need like:
1) Checkin/checkout. Since now you need to check out in VS2008, work in Blend, checkin in VS2008.
2) Intellisense. There's an addon, but it's WPF intellisense unfortunately for us working in Silverlight.
3) A white-ish skin. Tough when all other programs are white and clean, and Blend has grey and darker grey themes for some reason

The folks in marketing hate it when they don't get to be the first ones to divulge when the next release will be or what features it will contain. And since they haven't said anything about this yet, I guess I can't either... What I
can say, is that we think you'll be happy with what the Blend team has been working on recently. There will be more information available around the MIX09 timeframe, so stay tuned!

The issue you mention with Design View is one the team is aware of and have been actively working on.

I have noticed that colleges that have web design and development programs including Flash, animation and games are very resistence to even considering offering courses covering the Microsoft Expression Studio and using Web and Blend.

Could you address the adoption issue at the college level?

What is Microsoft doing about this problem?

Is it catching on or is everbody waiting for at least version 3.0 before they offer courses using Expression Studio as part of a web design and development program.

I for one think if you point out the strengths you can leverage in terms of .Net Framework class libraries, language choice, SQLServer and Visual Studio and ASP.NET you can make a very strong case.

Most are still using Adobe Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Illustrator, Flash, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Will the Expression Studio ever have a NLE for video or is Microsoft given up on this type of application at the professional level?

I think a release date announcement regarding Microsoft Expression Studio 3.0 will be made at Mix 2009 so I will not ask the obvious question.

Thanks again for the video.

PS. I will confirm that the designers, animators and graphics artists I know do not have Microsoft on their mind when it comes to designer applications or tools. At best they have heard of the Expression Studio.

Happy to hear your concerns regarding adoption of Microsoft technologies at Universities. We have a team here at Microsoft dedicated to helping students, faculty and universities in leveraging Microsoft technologies both directly in the classroom as well as
outside of the classroom.

Specific to Expression we worked with faculty to build out a semester long Introduction to Web Design course leveraging Expression Studio 2. You can find these materials at Microsoft’s Faculty Connection Resource Center (www.microsoft.com/faculty
). The curriculum for the
Introduction to Web Design course is currently our #4 downloaded resource to our Faculty audience and is also being leveraged around the world in Secondary Schools to help in our efforts to grow the Beginner Developer Pipeline. Microsoft works with secondary
faculty around the world through programs like the Innovative Teachers Network (https://www.microsoft.com/education/pil/IT_network.aspx ) where K-12 educators push the boundaries of their
curriculum to provide technology rich curriculum.

Finally we run the world’s largest Student Technology Competition the Imagine Cup (www.ImagineCup.com ) which contains the
Design Invitational. Students from around the world compete in the creation of their Designs leveraging Expression products and win their way to the World Wide final which this year will be held in Cairo, Egypt.

We are always looking for better ways to empower a technology rich education for all. Let us know if you have other ideas of how we might be able to do this further.